Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Hot Mix 2011: #50 to 41

50 Gotye “Easy Way Out”This reminded us of “Freetime” by Kenna (keeping with the 2001-nostalgia). A reviewer on The Singles Jukebox - a song-review site compiled by too-cool-for-school pop-nerds - notes the appropriate sequencing on Gotye’s LP with “Easy Way Out” sounding like it ends about 2 minutes too early, signaling a relationship that's ended too soon and leading into the record’s most popular song, the indie-harp male-female-duet “Somebody That I Used To Know” which hit #1 in Australia earlier this year.

49 Passenger Peru “Your Hunger”From the ashes of Pet Ghost Project comes Brooklyn’s Passenger Peru. We don’t know a lot about this band, but if the impressive half-LP on their Bandcamp.com page is any indication, they will be worth getting to know over the next year. (Our thanks goes out to Exploding In Sound for keeping us informed.)your hunger by passenger peru

48 Real Estate “It’s Real”Sometimes a song just “sounds” nostalgic even though it doesn’t evoke any specific memories or time-periods, such as Supertramp’s “Take The Long Way Home” or Washed Out’s “Feel It All Around.” “It’s Real” seems to be the same type of song, delivering pensive melancholy along with vague nostalgia. “Sometimes I feel that I don’t know the deal...” Yeah, same here...

47 Jamaica “Short and Entertaining”Following in the path of bands like Phoenix and Tahiti 80, Jamaica are another distinctly French pop band who named themselves after a spot on the globe where it just happens to be hot all the time, with their production value placing emphasis on pristine clarity. Jamaica differs slightly in their stance toward incorporating distorted muddy guitar patches and hints of the same type of dissonance that wouldn’t be out of place on a Nirvana b-side.

46 Milk Music “Beyond Living”Milk Music’s stock began to soar just slightly, after they unexpectedly received a profile on Pitchfork a few months back, so congrats to their promotion manager or whoever set that up. They totally deserve it, and we’d be incredibly happy if this lead to more awesome bands from Olympia receiving similar treatment in 2012. (Broken Water anyone?)

45 Foo Fighters “Rope”
Man, we’re so stoked man... The whole gang’s back together again. Well, except for that Sunny Day Real Estate drummer dude, but no one remembers him. The woop-de-doo Grammies and Rolling Stone really loved this album for some reason, even though “Rope” is its only awesome song, and probably their strongest single since “The Best Of You.” Which reminds us, we were unaware that "The Best Of You" was such popular meme topic... (We’re also happy to report back from our associates that Foo Fighters are still one of the best arena bands, and still opening live sets with “This Is A Call" as of November 2011!)

44 M83 “Midnight City” / Neon Indian “Fallout” / Hooray For Earth “No Love”The universally beloved “Midnight City” sure is a doozy. Golly, what a humdinger. It has the same soft-loud structure as “Kim & Jessie” from 3 years ago which is also a great song that lots of people thought sounded 80’s when it actually didn’t. (Using 80's synths does not equal "authentic 80's.") And check out these sick stats: Pitchfork's #1 "track" of the year. PopMatters #1 best song of the year. Paste's #2 best song of the year! Yowza. While we thoroughly enjoy M83, we don’t really get why this is “song of the year” material as opposed to most other positively-reviewed chillwave singles like “Fallout,” or any recent chill-keyboard-indie like “No Love.” From where we stand, both are very strong singles, and just as good as “Midnight City.” (Kudos to SPIN's Charles Aaron who not only similarly tied the song at #12 with another chill-synth single, but was also somehow correctly able to identify the 80s-synth as a Korg.)

43 The Drums “Days”“Days go by...” Isolated.. Singular bass-guitar notes carry about half of this song. Singalong chorus. Much later, we learned The Drums are not from Europe, and to make matters even more frustrating, we learned they’re American. Also they’re LP wasn’t exactly “solid,” while it did produce three of the year’s best singles, which very few bands can say. “Good sounding” albums without memorable songs aren’t worth as much to us as bands like The Drums who can get our attention with a handful of great singles.

42 Fabolous “You Be Killin’ Em”#NICE. Among the hottest beats of the year... More 90’s beats plz. And it would’ve placed higher had it not been for “the shitty boring coda section,” another strange hiphop trend in 2011. #Shoe-icide. Also, weird video... The hot chick played by Kanye’s bald ex-girlfriend literally “kills” people (or something).

41 Ringo Deathstarr “Other Things”When people hear bands like Yuck or Japandroids and say “hey these bands must be way into 90’s-nostalgia because the songs have loud guitars,” these same people should stop reviewing music because they clearly have a very bad memory about what music during the 90’s actually sounded like. Ringo Deathstarr remembers... They were there. And they helped to prove 2 things: #1 Songwriting chops DO matter, since 90’s songwriting sounds different from most current songwriters. And more importantly, #2 if you’re actually gonna go for a “90’s” sound, production is key. With that said, “Other Things” is our favorite 90’s jam from 2011.

what's it?

TASTE MY KIDS compiles recommendations for a happier and healthier existence, most often in the form of "best-of" lists, youtube posts, album or movie reviews, and various scribblings. We lived on Geocities starting in August 2000. In January 2009, times got tough and posts were on hiatus until a new host could be located. Geocities eventually died anyway, and now we live on blogspot. True story.